Google has unveiled a number of new products and initiatives in order to protect freedom of expression on the internet.

The products
were unveiled at a summit in New York yesterday (October 21) entitled “Conflict
in a Connected World”, which was hosted by Google Ideas in partnership with the
Council on Foreign Relations and the Gen Next Foundation.

At the summit,
which brought together “hacktivists”, dissidents, entrepreneurs, security
experts and others, Google Ideas introduced its new products and initiatives to
protect free expression: uProxy, Project Shield and the Digital Attack Map.

uProxy, which
is still under development, is a browser extension for Google Chrome and
Firefox which Google says will provide a “trusted pathway to the web, helping
protect an Internet connection from filtering, surveillance and misdirection.”
The tool was developed by the University of Washington and Brave New Software,
a non-profit software building organisation, and was seeded by Google Ideas.

Another of the
new initiatives, Project Shield, was also revealed. Project Shield will allow
people to use Google’s technology to protect their website which may have
otherwise come under threat from distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.

A DDoS attack
can be carried out by anyone and can take down almost any website. The attacker
looks to flood the targeted website with unwanted traffic, overloading its
servers and subsequently bringing the website down. Small, independent websites
– the sites which have, in the past, been instrumental in sparking social
change – are particularly at risk from DDoS attacks, as they are unlikely to
have adequate defence infrastructure.

Project Shield
brings together Google’s current DDoS mitigation technologies and Page Speed
Service (PSS), allowing people to better protect their websites and in turn
preserve freedom of expression. Google are currently inviting “trusted testers”
to further develop the tool.

Google Ideas
also revealed one more related service, the Digital Attack Map. Built through a
partnership between Google Ideas and Arbor Networks, the map is a “live data
visualisation” that maps DDoS attacks from around the world.

Writing on the
official blog, Jared Cohen, director of Google Ideas, said: “This tool shows
real-time anonymous traffic data related to these attacks on free speech, and
also lets people explore historic trends and see related news reports of
outages happening on a given day."